Unofficial news and tips about Google

March 20, 2011

Google Chrome's Experimental New Tab Page for Touch Screens

A recent Chromium build added a new option to the about:flags page: an experimental new tab page. The updated new tab page is a work in progress and it's optimized for touch screens. Right now, it only includes the web apps you've previously installed, which can be organized in multiple home screens.

"The idea with this touch NTP is to focus (for now) on apps, and make it easyto arrange them into pages. You can swipe/drag to switch pages, and pressand hold to lift an app and rearrange it," explains Google.

I found an interesting comment in one of Google's JavaScript files: "Note that, while the product portion of the touch NTP is designed to work just in the latest version of Chrome, this hack attempts to add some support for working in older browsers to enable testing and demonstration on existing tablet platforms. In particular, this code has been tested to work on Mobile Safari in iOS 4.2. The goal is that the need to support any other browser should not leak out of this file - and so we will hack global JS objects as necessary here to present the illusion of running on the latest version of Chrome."